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Winchester hosts pop-science author

Winchester Academy will examine the Earth’s history in rocks when it meets at 6:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 18, at the Waupaca Area Public Library.

Marcia Bjrnerud, a professor of geology and environmental studies at Lawrence University, will be the speaker.

Bjrnerud is a structural geologist who specializes in the physics of earthquakes and mountain building. Her work combines field-based studies of bedrock geology with quantitative models of rock mechanics.

Her Winchester Academy lecture will focus on the rocks of Lake Superior and how they present a chronicle of North America’s first 3 billion years. The presentation will tell the little-known bedrock stories of familiar places in Wisconsin.

Bjrnerud’s popular science book Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth, “displays a fluidity, clarity, and awe that will inspire further reading,” according to reviewer Gilbert Taylor in Booklist.

Her popular, yet erudite style of science writing have been compared to Stephen Jay Gold’s essays.

For example, when explaining the periodic table of elements, Bjrnerud says it “fails to inspire the awe its human users should feel at knowing that every atom of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon in our bodies is simply on short-term loan from the cosmic library; was previously issued to remote stars, rogue comets, and rocky cliffs; and will soon be returned for further circulation.”

She received her doctoral degree in structural geology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University. She is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Norway in 2000-01 and New Zealand in 2009.

The program is free, open to the public and will be preceded by coffee, cookies and conversation at 6 p.m.

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